This invention relates to conveyor systems, and more particularly to a unique, high speed carton sorting conveyor system.
Recently, efforts have been made in the area of distribution warehousing to increase the degree of automation in the handling of packages or cartons. The goal in these efforts has been to more efficiently fill orders at the warehouse and direct the desired units or numbers of individual packages and cartons to the proper location at a loading dock. Generally, a plurality of different products such as stereo receivers, tape recorders, turntables, etc. may be packaged in different cartons with the contents of each carton marked thereon. These cartons would be stored in different locations in a warehousing area. Customer orders received at the warehouse would require different numbers of each product to be delivered to a loading dock area for transportation to the customer. With small warehousing concerns, employees will manually remove the required number of products from a storage area to fill each order. This manual process is time consuming, inefficient and therefore relatively expensive.
In larger warehousing operations employing automatic or semi-automatic conveyor equipment, a sorting system may be employed to direct individual packages to the proper destination conveyors. A typical sorting system is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 3,034,665 to Speaker, entitled CONVEYOR SYSTEM and issued on May 15, 1962. As shown therein, a generally circular or endless conveyor is employed in conjunction with a plurality of trays, a tray tilting mechanism and a control system for encoding destination information and selectively actuating the tilt mechanisms to discharge a package or carton onto a destination conveyor. These systems have been effective in increasing the rate at which orders may be filled. Consequently warehousing concerns have been more efficiently operated. As the size of the warehouses has increased, however, a need has been demonstrated for a sorting system capable of increased capacity. Such a system preferably should have the qualities of reduced complexity, reduced manufacturing costs, increased ease of manufacture and increased reliability.